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“Oppenheimer” is a 3-hour epic about the life of J Robert Oppenheimer. In certain ways, it’s reminiscent of how movies used to be made. The dialogue is smart. The editing was crisp, and (because I know the sound editor), the soundtrack was terrific—being “big” when it was needed and subtle when required. It’s also a “whodunit” wrapped in soft commie propaganda inside leftist messaging. //
The film bends time by blending Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance revocation hearing with the 1957 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the nomination of former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss. Christopher Nolan flips back and forth from Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing (shot in color) to the Commerce Committee public hearing, as if they are being held contemporaneously. //
The movie soft-pedals Oppenheimer’s lack of personal morals throughout. //
Oppenheimer recognized Nazis as imperialists and evil, as Jew-hating madmen but apparently couldn’t see the Jew-hating Karl Marx and mass-murdering Joe Stalin in the same light. The film follows a well-worn script that communists weren’t “all that bad”. It tracks the oft-used illustration of how communists were “ruined” just for being communists. It never mentions that most American communists were counting on and willing to foment a Soviet-style revolution in America. //
“Oppenheimer” is an interesting story, but the film is way too long. It spends too much time mythologizing a conflicted (mostly immoral) man and ultimately left me empty – not caring for the man beyond the fact that (if he liked it or not) helped end the war against Japan with the deaths of 100,000 dead civilians. Oppenheimer had an unintended hand in my dad coming home from the war. For only that reason, I thank him.
Moviegoers might have been driven to Barbie by nostalgia, or controversy, or simply to participate in the cultural zeitgeist. And I certainly don’t think every Christian must see the film. I respect those, like my mom, who’ve chosen not to contribute their time and money to this pink summer blockbuster. But since seeing the film, I’ve had several good (and difficult) talks with both my mom and my daughter about its themes. I suspect that’s true for millions of people trying to navigate the tensions in our world between feminism and patriarchy, between men and women.
I hope Christians who do see the movie will engage these conversations. Our culture is struggling with questions about power, gender, purpose, and death. Barbie raises these questions brilliantly, but believers can point to the One who ultimately answers them: the Triune God who created all humans with purpose and for partnership. Only Jesus Christ, as creator and incarnate redeemer, can tell each of us who we really are, what we are for, and that we are profoundly loved.
Hollywood isn’t known as a breeding ground for healthy marriages, so it comes as a surprise when Hollywood films have anything good to say about marriage, especially as sexual degeneracy in films keeps increasing exponentially and marriage and monogamy become more and more marginalized. This is why it may come as a shock to filmgoers to see the blockbuster “Oppenheimer” portraying and lauding the strengths of marriage, as well as warning against the threats to it, though in unnecessarily graphic detail.
A brief caveat spectator: “Oppenheimer” contains three R-rated sex scenes, which mar the otherwise masterful film. The graphic nature of these scenes is wholly unnecessary and even uncharacteristic of writer-director Christopher Nolan, who has famously not featured sex in any of his prior films. The film would be a magnum opus were it not for the inclusion of these scenes.
The Angel Studios thriller Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel, continues to draw crowds at the theater. The film was made on a relatively low budget of $14.5 million when the industry spent $60-$100 million on movies in a comparable genre. Sound of Freedom, an apolitical film opposing something civilization should be against, that is, the sexual trafficking of children, has turned out to be a Rorschach test for where people, particularly the media, actually stand on the subject. //
If we look at France on the eve of the Revolution, we have a good explanation for the reception of Sound of Freedom.
Marquis de Sade did not exist in a vacuum. If you think of his more lurid writings as a DIY manual for deviant sexual practices, I think you are missing the point. He chronicled in literary form a debauched world nearly schizophrenic in its contradictions. //
This parallel society was possible because the upper crust was immensely rich, untouchable by the law, and bored because their roles in governing and war-making had been farmed out to social inferiors. With nearly unlimited power and wealth at their disposal but with nothing useful to do, the elites searched for ways to amuse themselves. But they weren’t in search of just any amusement. They wanted amusements that the commoners couldn’t enjoy. In the case of de Sade, this was a kind of sexual acting-out that might have resulted in a commoner getting a one-way trip to the Mediterranean galleys or a tumbril ride to the guillotine.
Power, as they say, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The corruption that comes with absolute power is not confined to the public acts of government; it become a part of man’s nature.
The lifestyle lived by the elite could have been what Charles Baudelaire described as “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” The desert is the monotony and boredom of everyday life, while the oasis is that rare moment of excitement or pleasure. But the excitement and pleasure quickly become boring, and that leads to the search for new stimulation.
I would argue that while the visible excesses of the ancien régime were held in check by public morality, we have advanced beyond that stage. We are at the stage that Friedrich Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values” and “the will to power.” Christian morality is dead as a restrictive force. Freed of that restriction, you can pursue whatever pleases you. There’s a catch, though. When commoners are engaged in activities that would have drawn stiff prison sentences only a decade ago, you have to find something else to scratch that itch. Enter child sex trafficking.
Child sex trafficking is despised in most of the civilized world, so our elites tart it up with private islands and resorts only reachable by private jets. The clothing, food, and setting give the tawdry purpose a patina of elegance.
From the whole Jeffrey Epstein saga, we know there is a market for child sex trafficking. I think Epstein is only the tip of the iceberg. If commoners can take a trip to Thailand or Cambodia, then there are more Lolita Expresses and “recruiters” like Ghislaine Maxwell catering to the needs of the superwealthy and the politically powerful. //
I think when you view the attacks on Sound of Freedom as a reaction to the lower social orders stigmatizing something the elites believe to be perfectly fine, much of the media reporting starts to make sense. After all, who are these unwashed cretins to tell the Masters of the Universe what is right and wrong. Once you stir into that the non-trivial number of people in the media who use child pornography and who think “intergenerational love” is natural, it is easy to see the trashing of a film as being less an exercise in journalism than an attack on what is perceived as an outmoded sexual ethic.
What we should learn from this movie and the reaction to it is that child sex trafficking is a big deal. It is bigger than Chester the Molester in the pedo-van or the little Honduran boy being rented online. It is an activity favored by the upper crust of Western society, such as one might find on the passenger list of the Lolita Express. The QAnon focus is a smokescreen. It is a way of discrediting the film without defending child sex trafficking and pedophilia. By extension, that discredits any investigation into child sex trafficking. Most of America has never heard of QAnon, and the fact that so many media outlets grabbed the same angle shows there was some coordination on the theme. While law enforcement is not looking at this entertainment for the superwealthy right now, with enough of a public outcry, they might. That would be bad for a lot of very wealthy men.
Today Universal releases “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan. The IMAX biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb.
Nolan’s film is based on the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. This review summarizes the book. Nolan’s film does not focus on the early career of this brilliant and eccentric academic. For that, we can rewatch “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961). Cinema can remind us of the 1940s’ heroic battles as well as more cerebral endeavors to develop instruments for detection, navigation, and propulsion.
Oppenheimer’s life holds major questions about the use of power that continue to affect the world today. His team’s scientific advances warrant a much closer look. //
The design challenge for Oppenheimer’s team was enormous. They had to investigate the fission process into a near-instantaneous chain reaction based on meager experimental results. Oppenheimer’s keen ability to comprehend and extol these specialists is a testament to his diligence during those long hours. //
Our violent introduction to the atomic age taints humanity’s acceptance of it. The amazing phenomenon of atomic nuclei releasing energy by exchanging nucleons holds enormous promise.
Had fission been discovered a decade earlier or later, it could have benignly provided electrical power. But in an existential military conflict, leaders deemed such patience a luxury America couldn’t afford. So humans turned this fantastic tool into a cudgel, and continue to live under that shadow today.
The movie “Oppenheimer” opens Friday. I’ve read and seen a lot about the man and his contribution to the Manhattan Project. Was he a genius? Sure. Was he later conflicted about what he did to usher in the atomic age and end World War II? Apparently. Would atomic energy have eventually found its way into weaponry without him? Of course.
The movie will spark a renewed “debate” regarding the efficacy and ethics of dropping two atomic bombs to end the war in the Pacific. On one side of the scale, there are people who firmly believe that killing a massive number of civilians wasn’t necessary. (The fire-bombing of Tokyo likely killed more people than died at Hiroshima, but that is another story.)
Those people might be pacifists; they might just be contrarians who believe that America could have warned the Japanese of our “super weapon.” America did, in fact, drop leaflets warning civilians of Hiroshima to get out. It was done throughout the war, but both cities were warned.
Or there are people who contend that we could have “demonstrated” one of the bombs by blowing up an open field. There is no evidence that the Japanese were not going to surrender after a demonstration.
On the other side of the ledger are people like me, who believe that although Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible means to an end, those two events brought a close to a world war. I am also convinced that without those bombs, I never would have been born because my father never would have come home.
My dad joined the Marines in 1943. Thereafter, he participated in five assault landings—island hopping with the Marines—then ending with the 4th and 6th Marines Divisions. The last big battle he was in was the assault on Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa, which resulted in 3,000 US casualties. It was the only time he gave any thought to dying. When he was in combat before that, he never thought he wasn’t coming home. Others were fatalistic. My dad was an optimist. But there was one other time he thought about death and dying in combat. Fortunately, it was after Japan had surrendered.
He was part of the occupying force that landed in Tokyo Bay (Task Force 31). He and thousands of Marines, sailors, and soldiers were on ships that slowly worked their way into the bay. That’s when he saw them. Thousands of flags. White flags. Like the hills were blanketed in snow. After the Japanese surrendered, the Japanese home forces were instructed to place a white flag on gun emplacements on the hills around the bay, so occupying forces would know where they were. My dad described it
Chills ran up and down my spine. I thought: “Man, if we’d invaded here, we would have been cut to ribbons.”
Operation Downfall was the invasion code name. Operation Olympic was the code name of the invasion of Kyūshū. My dad would have been part of Olympic’s landing and invasion force. Estimates of casualties vary, but most estimates place casualties in the millions, and that was just for Allied forces. DoD estimates of KIA were conservatively placed at a half-million dead soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
When my dad stood on the deck of his ship and stared at the hills around the bay, he knew. He knew had he been on a landing craft in November 1945 for his 6th assault landing, he wasn’t going home. After three years of never being wounded, his odds of survival were slim.
Chris DeRose @chrisderose
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Oppenheimer is sure to revive some debates about the end of WWII. Worth noting: Purple Heart medals awarded in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, War on Terror—all 370,000 since 1945—were manufactured for the anticipated invasion of Japan. We have 120,000 remaining.
10:34 AM · Jul 21, 2023
The 1998 Jim Carrey film about a man whose entire life is filmed quickly came to embody a new age of reality television. And, 25 years on, it continues to resonate, writes Emily Maskell.
Soylent Green is more famous for its twist than anything else — and that’s okay. //
Before Star Wars changed everything in 1977, most serious science fiction movies were dark. And 50 years ago, on April 19, 1973, one of the darkest sci-fi movies of all time was released. Half a century later, we’re still quoting Soylent Green and its big twist, but the movie’s cultural influence goes even deeper.
Cruise briefly branched out with two sci-fi films that saw him shoot futuristic guns, operate futuristic vehicles, and put his grimacing face under straightforward titles Cormac McCarthy would be proud of. Edge of Tomorrow was profitable and lauded for its clever, pacy take on the time-loop thriller … and then there was Oblivion.
Oblivion turned a profit too — it’s difficult for a Cruise movie to not bring audiences in — but reviewers were split down the middle, and it’s rare to see it looked back on with the same fondness as Edge of Tomorrow. Even the generic title, an obscure reference to the movie’s exploration of memory, is appropriately forgettable, and its relatively slow burn isn’t friendly to fans looking to watch Cruise gun down aliens with a smirk on his face. But there’s a lot to like here, even if you can feel the genre trappings warring with the Cruiseisms.
It’s 2077, and Jack (Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are the only humans left on Earth. Decades ago, humanity fought off an alien invasion that destroyed the Moon and left Earth uninhabitable, and it’s Jack’s job to oversee a fleet of drones that mop up enemy survivors and convert the planet’s oceans into hydrothermal energy. He reports to a woman named Sally aboard the orbiting “Tet” space station, and with the job almost complete, the trio is due to join a colony of survivors on Titan in a couple of weeks.
Brace yourself, but not all goes as planned.
There are some filmmakers who would rather leave the meaning of their films up to the audience to interpret than explain what the filmmaker is trying to say. Stanley Kubrick was one of the directors, opting to challenge audiences at every level.
He didn’t subscribe to one single interpretation of his work, telling Playboy magazine in 1968, “You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deeper level—but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue." //
Kubrick responded to Yao’s question regarding the final scene in 2001, where the protagonist Dave Bowman lies in bed, saying, “I tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out because when you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it.”
The director continues, adding, “The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form and they put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room and he has no sense of time, it just seems to happen as it does in the film.”
To elaborate on this concept, Kubrick notes that the room was a very deliberately inaccurate replica of French architecture to show that the entities had some idea of what Dave would find comforting and familiar like humans do to animals in zoos.
Concluding his comments about the film’s ending, Kubrick says, "When they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some know of superbeing and sent back to Earth. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, that was what we were trying to suggest.”
SAO PAULO (AP) — Pelé, the Brazilian king of soccer who won a record three World Cups and became one of the most commanding sports figures of the last century, died Thursday. He was 82. //
Throughout the years, the legend of Pelé continued to grow – so much so, that in the late 1960s, the two factions in the Nigerian Civil War reportedly agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire so they could watch Pele play in an exhibition game in Lagos.
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan summarized Pelé’s stardom when the soccer star visited him at the White House and he said: “My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the president of the United States of America. But you don’t need to introduce yourself, because everyone knows who Pelé is.” //
EzraTank
7 hours ago
I loved the movie Victory with him, Stallone, and Michael Caine.
Watching the video of Dick Proenneke living Alone In The Wilderness is an escape, allowing us to imagine a life free from the suffocating technological and bureaucratic grips. //
One my favorite documentaries is of Dick Proenneke building his Alaskan cabin Alone in the Wilderness. I’m not sure when I first saw it, but it was well into adulthood, and I think it was on PBS.
I watched it whenever I could. There was something so appealing about not just the story, but the life alone.
I thought about it today when I saw a link to a video of a Swedish 18-year-old building a cabin by hand, I Spent 3 Years Alone Building A Log Cabin:
https://youtu.be/FtiaSn5iCg8 //
alaskabob
December 25, 2022 at 10:25 pm
When he had to fly out from his cabin…it was a challenge for the bush pilot.
Proenneke never bathed much. That aside he was an amazing character.
In the film, Clark proclaims the house is decked out with”25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights.” At 7W per bulb, that works out to 175,000 watts (175 kW). Putting aside, for a moment, the secondary concerns like whether or not his home could handle that load, let’s just deal with the raw numbers.
At 1989 electricity prices, that means Clark’s display uses $12.25 per hour. Run from, say, 6 PM to midnight every day, it would cost $73.50 per day. If run for the month of December, it would cost $2,205. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $5,294. //
You can read the analog dials on an old power meter to determine how much energy your home uses. It’s an old trick we shared in our guide to measuring your home’s energy use. A 2014 blog post from an equally curious person used that very trick to calculate how much energy the Griswold home is using while the lights are on based on how long the meter is visible and how many times the various dials rotate in that time frame.
We have to assume that the clip was sped up for theatrical effect because if the meter was spinning in real time, ol’ Clark’s house was sucking down 529 MW—or about as much power a quarter of the greater Chicago region. So whatever the activation of auxiliary power did in the film, we can safely assume it delivered that much extra power to the grid.
Following the sky-high box-office numbers of “Top Gun: Maverick,” anyone who glanced at the movie trailer for “Devotion” — a true story of heroic U.S. Naval pilots, currently in theaters — probably thought producers were trying to cash in on the craze.
This historical film has been in the works for over six years, however, starting shortly after the book, “Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice,” began to make waves. It recounts how two long-overlooked pilots led a mission that turned the tide in the Korean War’s most brutal battle.
“That entire war has been woefully forgotten,” author Adam Makos told me in a phone interview. “The last major Korean War movie was ‘Pork Chop Hill’ starring Gregory Peck, released in 1959 — over 60 years ago. And Hollywood hasn’t gone there since.”
JOE BOB: Well you’re a well-known Hollywood liberal. You always put social justice causes into your movies. You made a passion project in 1962 called “The Intruder”, starring William Shatner, about racism in the rural south. An award-winning movie that you once told me was the only movie you ever made that lost money – and that became a turning point in your career.
CORMAN: Yes. It was the only film, at that time, that I ever made that lost money. And the reason was, I believe – although the film did win a couple of awards and the reviews were wonderful – but it lost money, and I think it lost money for two reasons. One, the public just didn’t want to see a picture about racial integration. And Two – and this is where my lesson came in – I was too earnest. I was delivering a message, I was not delivering entertainment.
JOE BOB: You always have a lot going on in the subtext in your films…is that accurate?
CORMAN: That is completely accurate. I am to the left, politically, but I never want to interfere with the entertainment quality of the film. At the same time, with the subtext of the film, there are thoughts that I would like to get in, personally. And I think it acts as a certain catalyst, to a certain extent with the combination. It makes the film more complex, and more interesting.
All of this amounts to revealing that Hollywood doesn’t think very highly of its fans and they express that sentiment in various ways. Sometimes it’s by cast and crew, sometimes it’s in the writing of the show itself, but it’s always going to paint the people creating the work as the enemy of the people meant to view it.
CORMAN: It led me to the themes of my films after that, where I made certain that I always delivered the entertainment value, and the themes I was interested in were always subtextual. They were all secondary.
Is there a way to say “Three Mile Island was scary, but perhaps overblown” without repeating condescendingly that nobody actually died? If so, Stone doesn’t know it. Is there a way to say, “Chernobyl was more a human error than a nuclear power error” without repeating with an implied sneer that no matter how many casualties it caused, it wasn’t as bad as you think it was? Dunno. Stone can’t resist the desire to both-sides his blaming for the political fight against nuclear power in the first place — conservatives are in the pocket of fossil fuel companies and liberals are easily scared hippies — nor to tear solar power and wind power to shreds, just for fun. Honestly, I have no objections to implications that low levels of nuclear radiation never hurt anybody and we should all be noshing on uranium rods like candy canes, but that’s the sort of suggestion — I made up the candy cane part — better delivered by a talking head with a medical degree than in affectless voiceover.
Actually, Stone’s voiceover isn’t affectless. It has the zealotry of a new convert, delivered with the same “I just had this explained to me in a meme!” combination of under-documentation and certainty you would expect from somebody arguing the long-term value of an ape NFT — not somebody telling you that if we don’t reduce emissions entirely by 2050 everybody will die.
In maybe the final 20 minutes, Nuclear finds a purpose. Stone talks to a number of intrepid American scientists and innovators who are trying to make inroads with SMRs — small modular reactors — and other evolutions of the technology. This is finally where Stone stops talking and starts listening, trying to illustrate the merits of what he’s being told. These pioneers are young, thoughtful and in desperate need of support from an energy community that needs its mind opened. Even if this segment of the documentary is a 20-minute commercial for both some small enterprises and some of the largest companies in the world, it feels worthy.
My instinct is that this closing section should be the film — 10-minute introduction and context, followed by 90 minutes of arguments looking to the future. My problem with Nuclear is less that it’s propaganda and more that it should have been better propaganda.
Original Soundtrack from the movie "The Butterfly" composed by Nicolas Errèra
The film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words was released in 2020, and offered a unique glimpse into Justice Clarence Thomas’ life and judicial philosophy. Since his 1991 confirmation hearings, the legacy media has delighted in poisoning the well with lies, smears, and racist tropes about the Justice. With the assistance of documentary filmmaker Michael Pack, Mark Paoletta decided to dig a new well, one that allowed people to draw their conclusions from Justice Thomas’ own life, words, and writings.
Pack spent 25 hours filming Justice Thomas, and six additional hours with his wife Ginni — a voluminous amount of discourse that was reduced to a two-hour documentary. Sadly, this left a prodigious amount of information on who the Justice is as a person, as well as his writings and viewpoints, unexplored. So, Paoletta decided that a book of the same name was in order. //
I sat down with Paoletta for an hour, and he stated that he is making it his life’s mission to present a true, candid, and unadorned portrait of this consequential jurist.
It’s a fascinating conversation that gives a glimpse not only into Clarence Thomas the United States Supreme Court Justice, but into Clarence Thomas the man and the humanitarian.
Driven by the pursuit of profit, Hollywood has a long history of capitulation to Chinese censors. Have producers finally found their backbone?
Taking a step back, you can see the mentality of the leftist journos that currently dominate mainstream media. That which is “apolitical” is actually “conservative.” If it doesn’t carry the message, then it must be right-leaning by default. Naturally, all that is conservative is bad which means not engaging in political pandering of any kind is bad. It satiates the white male patriarchy //
Does the movie skew conservative? No, but when you’ve drifted so far to the left that everything is viewed through the lens of identity and class struggle, anything that doesn’t compliment your worldview becomes “conservative.” I truly believe the author of this piece doesn’t understand just how far he’s sunk into his own ideology. He sees “monsters” where there are none and is now charging at them through his writing.
It’s just a windmill, dude. //
The fight is over whether or not the film is “anti-woke.” It’s not anti-woke, because it doesn’t engage in politics. It doesn’t bother with political concepts. It’s just good storytelling that anyone can enjoy if they would take off their political blinders and enjoy the movie for what it is.
And what it is, is a well though-out sequel that took time and effort to be a solid piece of cinema. Its continuity from the first film makes sense; the characters and their motivations make sense, the problems and the solutions both make sense, and the stakes make sense.
If anything counts against the left, it’s that the film is a loud message to Hollywood that apolitical movies with solid screenwriting, acting, and apolitical marketing are a winning formula. Don’t preach, just do the best job you can to make a solid film that entertains. That’s it. It’s not a message the activist left wants Hollywood to hear, but Maverick’s box office returns are saying it pretty loudly.
I recommend you go help it get louder by seeing it yourself.